Chapter 2: What's "Left"? Part V

Now take our own society and imagine it after a socialist revolution. Do you imagine anyone in the Atomwaffen SS is someone who will be able to reconcile themselves peacefully to these changes? Or will there be violence by these arch-reactionaries when they're told they no longer get to do that? That will definitely happen, and in that scenario we will definitely have to either shoot or reeducate them. I may be on the side of the people just wanting to shoot them and get it over with when that time comes; we may be that desperate and that may become necessary in certain material conditions. But I would rather hope we can avoid such measures wherever possible, and make like an early socialist and love our enemies instead. Maybe not love them necessarily, but at least give them a second chance at life, if we can afford to do so and it will not threaten the permanence of the revolution. I don't want people to think socialists are bleak and heartless and motivated out of pure hatred; it's quite the opposite. To paraphrase Che, every revolutionary is motivated first and foremost by a profound feeling of love for the working class.

But we can't have these reactionaries out and about and living their lives. They will need to learn how they have hurt people, and cannot be trusted with freedom until they do. We can't have them voting or serving in any elected office or government job, possibly even for the rest of their lives if they never reconcile themselves with the revolution. A truth commission will have to figure out which cops killed which people and which cops, DAs and judges helped cover it up, so we can deliver belated but necessary justice to all those guilty of murder and being an accessory to murder.

The emphasis on collective rights over individual rights is why we condone things like gulags. Obviously we don't condone non-Marxist-Leninist gulags, and even Marxist-Leninist gulags had the occasional apolitical grudge politicized via gulag, which is obviously a grievous abuse of power. This last bit is important. Between that and their increased use in cynical power struggles between opportunist petty bourgeois politicians, the Soviet people were increasingly repulsed from the Soviet system by the gulags. Under Khrushchev and afterwards, people saw them not as a fount for justice and reform but as a way to settle personal scores and terrorize the masses for their own benefit. Exceptionally authoritarian tools like gulags must be used exceptionally, no matter how effective they may be, because if they are not solely used with severe gravity against unquestioned counter-revolutionaries, they will eventually be used cynically and divide the workers from the socialist party in question.

But as Marxist-Leninists, people who assert the need for the authoritarianism of a revolution, we cannot shy away from this. Occasionally the class war will take a form where such extreme measures will be necessary. By definition, any sort of a shooting war is one such. A violent revolution is another such. Essentially, there are times when the due process and bureaucracy that protects our rights gets in the way of doing what is necessary. The bougies recognize this; they invented the concept of martial law for that. A proletarian socialist revolution requires something more democratic, and such a process was invented in ancient Rome. It's called a dictatorship.

No really, hear me out. The very word "dictator" is Latin and means exactly what it sounds like in Latin: one guy telling the rest what to do. However, this dictator had to win a Senatorial or popular vote (depending on the period in question), and his dictatorship was time-limited to half a year, and oftentimes major decisions he made had to be ratified afterwards by popular vote. When we socialists resort to having a single person making weighty decisions for all of us, we need someone we chose with that task, who remains accountable to us. The ancient Roman institution of the dictatorship oddly sounds ideal for that. Not the word as it has come to be defined, which is more or less as an emperor without any semblance of political legitimacy. We need no emperors.

As a side note, such a concept has been applied in the modern context of leftism, in Venezuela. The National Assembly of Venezuela passed enabling laws granting Hugo Chavez constitutionally dictatorial powers four different times - in 1999, 2001, 2007, and 2010. Each time, Chavez was able to act without restraint, within the bounds set by the given enabling law, and any measure he passed unsatisfactory to 5% of the Venezuelan population would be submitted to a referendum (Embassy of Venezuela to the United States, "The Facts: Venezuela's Enabling Law," Venezuelanalysis, January 17, 2011, https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5939 ). The only difference between this and ancient Rome is the use of the word "dictator," but the phrase "enabling law" also describes what a real actual dictator in modern parlance, Adolf Hitler, used to destroy German democracy. What we call the thing is immaterial, but it is self-evidently a good tool in the hands of responsible socialists and a bad one in the hands of fascists.

Continue on to Part VI